Life with the Two Crazy Dogs

I can’t believe it when I saw the price of gas per gallon this afternoon.  At Kwik Trip it is $2.989 and at SuperAmerica by our home is $3.039.  That is cheap.  I had the tank filled on Sunday it was $3.139 and I said that was cheap coz the amount I paid did not go over $50.00 for a full tank.

The price at the pump 2 weeks ago was $3.59 and I was complaining about.  Had to put in half a tank coz it was too expensive.  If I were to pump the full tank, I would be paying $64.00 which will last me a week. 

It’s so sad when we say the price of gas is cheap at $2.989 when it used to be $.98 or $1.02 per gallon 11 years ago.  I think it’s time to get the drilling going on in Alaska.

I have made a facial appointment for this weekend after much coaxing from Corrine.  She said my face so need one, really bad.  Honestly, I have never given a thought of going for facials.  This coming facial would be my second I have in my adult life.  My first was, I think, I was 19.  The reason she has been pressing me to make that apointment was all the blackheads and all the “junk” on my face.  There are also acne from stress and most probably accidentally touching my face not knowing how dirty my hands were.  I’m kinda excited for this weekend and I can predict what the lady, Jenny, is going to say when she sees my brown spots and acne invaded face.

I watched a movie during the weekend called Stirs of Echoes with Kevin Bacon, who plays Tom, a blue collar worker married to Maggie and has a son, Jake.  The start of the movie has Jake in the bathtub talking to “himself” with his dad in the adjoining bedroom watching him.  Fast forward a little, Tom and his wife went for a party ending with Tom being hynoptized my his sister-inlaw.  After the hynopsis session, he is able to “see things” on that same night after they came home.  It turns out his son too is able to “see” these things.  Whereas his son is calm and talks to the “people/person” he sees, Tom is the opposite. 

The reason why I bring this up is Corrine told me that Ms J who works for her is also able to see these things (call the third eye) and can listen to what these people are talking about and talks back to them.  Ms. J told Corrine she was only 12 years old when she started seeing these “people”.  She said she can feel a blast of cool air around her when these folks are around and they do always come as close as possible to the human to suck their warmth.  When i hear these, it gave me the creeps down my spine.  When I saw the Kevin Bacon movie, there were a few scenes where the dead girl’s spirit was trying to get warm from the hot water in the bathtub.  

Also when these folks starts talking all at the same time to her, she said it’s the most annoying where it disturbs her sleep.  Creepy, man.  Her mom went to the temple to get a “fu” for her and from then, these folks did not disturb her during her sleep, but she said she do see them still.  So, I asked Corrine did Ms J really see a lot of these people during the month of the Ghost Festival and she said yes.  There are actually a lot of these folks wondering around.  This is so eerie even when I’m typing this out.  Corrine told me about the chinese term for a person who is capable to see these things but I can’t remember.  I remember the old folks always say not to bring little kids out during the month of Ghost Festival and Ms J said it’s true that little kids should not be out a lot.  Why I asked Corrine.  She said these spirits are always hanging around little kids trying to “suck” the warmth from these little bodies.  And when Ms J can feel if a place is not “clean”.  Dang!  Corrine said after she had listened all these from Ms. J, she dare not go to the bathroom on her own when she was in the restaurant. 

These spirits are harmless but they like to “kacau” (disturb) her, Ms J said.  So I asked again kacau in what sense?  They would talk to her, ask her questions, tickle her, or lay/sit next to her.  Her mom and older sis are also has the ability to see these things.  But for Ms J, that ability has since ceased which she was glad but then she said according to the lady at the temple her mom frequents said that when Ms J reaches 29+ the “third eye” will open again.  Oh my god, after listening to all these, I kept looking around in the restaurant and when at home especially to see if I could feel the “coolness” that Ms. J described. 

Scared yet?  Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you but I want to write it down so I can remember what Corrine told me.

…was going by too quickly for me.  I have been slacking a lot on my blog and let alone Facebook.  I am not doing much with Wordsraper either.  Wordscraper is the other version of Scrabulous.  Scrabulous was taken down for a few days due to some patented legal stuff going on between the creators of Scrabulous and Hasbro, the owners of Scrabble.  So the Scrabulous creators worked on re-designing Scrabulous and it became Wordscraper.  It still works the same but with this new application, the person starting the new game is able to create their own rules.

Simmie came over this weekend which was really nice.  A nice break from my every weekend crap I do i.e. cleaning, bathe the boys, dusting and all the fun stuff that needs to be cleaned.  She and I chatted till midnight.  If I wasn’t yawning my head out, I would have stayed up with her and continued on our chitter-chatter.  Our malaysian accents/slang were flying out from our mouths.  DB said the dining room was flooded with Malaysian accents, the Manglish.  Of course la, two Malaysians, hang out together, that is the only time to practice our Manglish, ma!!  Good thing he is cool enough to speak to me with all the la’s too the next day .

Both Simmie and I went to Eden Prairie’s  Costcos, a very nice place compare to Sams.  Sams is getting to be so filthy and very “chaap”.  I was comparing the prices between the two places of the items I usually buy.  Some of the items are cheaper and some a little tad bit more.  What I like is at Costcos, there are more organic stuff and best of all there’s Caribou’s Obsidian coffee beans.  I told DB about Costcos carrying Caribou Obsidian, he was wild about getting it from there.  It is cheaper by the pound.  And yes, Simmie got me a membership card, she being the primary cardholder.  She is just so SUHWEET!!!  Thanks, Simmie!  I can see me going to Costco in the coming weeks.

And from Costco’s we went to Albertville Outlet mall which was on the way to St Cloud for Simmie.  It was my first time to the outlet mall.  It is a great place to shop.  I almost went into each and every store, look see, look see.  The only two stores I bought anything was Banana Republic, a pair of shorts and Aeropostles.  Aero is the only place now I can find pants that fit me.  Yep, I needed new pants, coz my size pants went up.  I blamed it on having an office job, sitting 8 hours a day, widening the butt.  I have to say I didn’t pretty good with this shopping trip.  The prices at the outlet are factory prices.  Going into the Coach and Nine West stores was definitely a will-power challenger.  I so wanted to get a Coach bag or a wallet.  The price for a handbag is $108 and the wallet thingy is $39.  Where can you find such great prices?  Nope, didn’t get anything in there.  Same with Nine West.  Always love their shoes and boots.  Nope didn’t get one and good thing they ran out of the size I want.  If not I would have bought the pair of boots.

And that’s the weekend which brings the start of the work week again……  I need a vacation.  can’t wait for this coming weekend.  I will have to take a trip to St Paul to visit the State Fair.  It ends Sept 4 on Labor Day.  Fair food here I come.

DB ordered new phones for us last week since his phone fell into the toilet and has gone haywired.  Funnily, the phone can still received text messages but it cannot send any calls or text messages.  He purchased a Blackberry Smartphone for himself and a LGenV2 for me through Verizon Wireless. 

Yes, the LGenV2 arrived on Tuesday and of course I was spending most of my spare time dinking with the new toy.  I was going to transfer my contacts from my old phone to the new one before activating the new phone.  Well, tough luck for me,  DB had already activated the new phone for me.  This LGenV has an internal QWERTY keypad with a bigger screen when the phone is opened.  I forgot to take a picture of the phone opened.  Click on the above link and you will be able to see the phone from all angles.  I totally love the Qwerty keypad coz I can type faster that way although I am still using my two thumbs.  I can receive calls both ways: from the front where I just have to hit Send or flip open the phone and put the call on speakers.  Suhweet!  The screen is so clear where it actually is capable of downloading pictures and videos for viewing.  And there voice activation where I can record my commands like say call home and the phone will call the number for me and this voice activation is also used in the the VZ Navigator, a GPS for the folks with no sense of direction like me. 

New toy and treating it like a baby.  Oh speaking of baby, which is out of subject, just heard from DB that Ally has already rolled over.  She was over at her grandma’s in Rochester, she rolled over.  Man, this little missy is so advance.  She was already half grown when she was born.  Can’t wait to see her again.  DB will be sitting her on Monday.  I’m wondering if we need to get a pack and play for her when she comes over our house.  Will have to discuss with the grampie. 

Back to my Olympics men’s swimming competition now and will be staying up for the  women’s gymnastics individual rounds .  Happy weekend, folks.

The humidity went away and of course the dewpoint dropped to the 50’s this evening.  I went for a walk with Ranger and Cooper.  There was a nice breeze, the sun was still quite hot to the skin.  Ranger as usual was holding up the walk but I still need to walk him, if not he wouldn’t do much business in the backyard of our house.

We walked out to the main road and farther down the sidewalk I saw this black dude walking towards our direction.  Ranger had to take a big business so I waited and this dude continued towards my direction.  However, when he saw me and the two boys walking towards him, he walked outside the sidewalk on to the shoulder of the road.  When we walked passed him he said:

He: You have big dogs.
Me: Yes, they are big (smiling and continued walking. He speaks with a heavy accent from Africa)
He: Yeah, they are big (looks like he was not comfortable with the boys)
He: Are they male? (By then I was a good 20 feet away from him)
Me: I’m sorry? Are they males you mean? Yes, they are males.
He: Are you married? (Pointing to his left hand and the ring finger)
Me: (WTF) Yeah, I am married. (And I pulled Ranger to walk away as fast as he could)

I kept turning back to see if that black dude was following me, but he didn’t.   I have never had a stranger while on a walk asked me this question.  When I got home, I pretended nothing happened on my walk, I didn’t tell DB.  If I had told him, he will tell me “No-More-Walks-By-Yourself”.  It’s better to keep things to myself sometimes.

It is the time of the year, fall semester is starting around the corner, like the first week of August.  I still have not enroll for my classes and I know I should be doing it soon.  What am I waiting for, and the answer is I am getting too comfortable with my time at home and I do not want to sacrifice my walks and doing whatever I want with my free time.  Walking the boys is taking so much of my time these days, namely Ranger who is walking soooooooooooo S-L-O-W, it actually makes me yawn coz I was bored.  It takes an hour 20 minutes to walk our regular 40 minutes route.  Then I have to walk Skinny, aka Chase.  He is fast and I really like.

So, back to enrolling for this semester, I really have to do some thing about it.  I’m thinking of “Employment Law for Business” and “Business Math” which are both accelerated courses.  That means they are consolidated to 8 weeks instead of the regular semester of 16 weeks per course.  Yes, it will be very stressful and I will feel rush the whole time.  I will have to quit my weekend job at Satay2Go and probably no walks for the boys.  Sigh, I will have to sleep on this (accelerated courses) more, it’s already stressing me out just thinking about it.

This is not a paid post.  It is my first time using cloth pads and I would like to write it down for whoever is interested in tossing disposal pads and venture into cloth.

I have been using disposals for Lord knows when.  My first sanitary pads were Southalls, those pads that are maxi in size with a loop on each end of the pad.  No sticky backing on those pads, or better still, the ones with “wings”.  Pure cotton.  I either have to wear a garter kinda thing to hold the pad in place which I eventually got rid of that pain in the butt thing and wore underwear that were tighter to keep the pad in place.  My mom taught me to wrapped the used pad with newspaper, and when you are in school, especially while in Primary school, it really sucked coz not many of my classmates have their periods that young.  I had to sneaked the big wrapped up bulky pad into my pocket and walked fast to the school toilets.  God, I hated those days.

When the sticky backing ones came into existance which I don’t even remember when, woohoo, they were thin ,comfy, and came with “wings”, however, the drawbacks, in my opinion: the pads stink to high heaven when wet and it is due to the chemical used in the pads; when you sweat, it sticks to the skin like glue; the plastic material keeps me warm.  But I still used them coz they were convenient.

How I got into cloth pads?  I first took noticed of cloth pad some time early last year.  I never knew they existed at all.  I was surfing the web, probably Googling on something and the result came out cloth pads.  I browsed through the site and that was that.

Then I read Jam’s post where he wrote about cloth versus disposals.  He wrote the post to emphasize the better use of cloth as opposed to disposables.  Some commenter thinks cloth is disgusting coz you need to wash the pads after using them instead of tossing them in the trash.  After reading his post, I thought I should try a few and find out how it is and is it really a hassle to wash them: will the stain comes out and how will I wash them, and write my review about my experience.

I ordered my cloth pads from New Moon Pads.  This company is a small home business created by a stay at home mom out in British Columbia, Canada.  I got myself some - different sizes for different flows.  I was still a little skeptical if it would be too warm for me since they are made from fleece on the backing and flannel for the tops.  One thing great about these pads from Renee, the owner of this business, the pads do not need any additional layering or stuffing extra layers.  They are all-in one pad.   Plus, Renee picks the cutest cloths to make these pads.  They are so darn cute. 

I received them just in time for my period.  Wow, I have to say they are very comfortable.  They stayed in place which I was very glad.  And best of all, they do not stink like the disposable ones.  During my heavy flow, I had the pad which has heavier absorbency; no soak through, very good absorbency.  How did I wash them?  I threw all of them in the washer with my other laundry.  My laundry is done with cold water so that works out well.  I didn’t have to pre-soak them.  Toss them in the washer with the clothes, add detergent and they came out clean, no stains at all.  I didn’t put in the dryer with my other clothes.  I air dried them and they still worked great.

When at work, I brought a clean one with me, put the used one in the bag.  I don’t immediately wash them after each use, just dumped them in the to-be washed laundry. Since I only bought a few, that’s why I only wash them when we do our regular laundry.

Will I continue to use these cloth pads?  The answer is Yes, I will.  Putting these cloth pads with pretty and cute prints on them takes the period cramps, bloatiness out of your mind.  It is slightly more expensive but in the long run it’s cheaper.  Moreover, the Canadian dollar is rising, Renee has special discounts on her products.  I will need to get more of them later from her, but right now I have to try to use up the disposable ones off slowly, but surely, unless I give them away.